Edward Lear Hotel, London W1

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‘Not exactly a palace, but it was cosy, with a smart flat-screen television and two unusual framed pictures above the bed’

Staying at the Edward Lear Hotel, just off Oxford Street, felt a little as
though I had stepped into one of the Victorian author and artist’s poems.

For a start, the walls of this odd hotel in a distinguished terraced townhouse
where he once lived are covered in copies of his famous literary nonsense.
On the way to my room on the top floor, I stopped by one of the verses.
“There was an old man of the Nile,” it began, “Who sharpened his nails with
a file; Till he cut off his thumbs, and said calmly ‘This comes — of